Journeying to the Truth

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He was one of three journalists the Soviets had chosen to tell the world that everything was coming up milk and honey in their farms.  For Stalin had rounded up all the resistant landowners in the fertile Ukraine and sent them to the tundra or had them shot.  He intended to turn all their farms into collectives, because according to the Marxist theory, that was the thing to do.  It had to work.  It also served to rub out his enemies, crush the Ukrainians, and establish the name he had given himself — "Steel" — as a synonym for cold, inflexible terror.

By temperament and upbringing, the writer was suspicious of all of the posturing of those who are considered great in the world.  He saw through the swagger.  He knew that Stalin was lying.  He also knew that everyone else in the Soviet Union knew it.  The question was not, "Are millions of people dying of hunger in Ukraine?" They were.  They had eaten their seed corn.  They had eaten their cattle.  There were credible reports of cannibalism.  An "experimental" farm run by Germans had to employ five men whose only work, day in and day out, was to bury the dead peasants who had come there begging for food.  Many millions would starve.

So the young Malcolm Muggeridge went to see for himself.  Many years later he made light of the danger.  "It was actually pleasant," he said of the Pullman coach that offered "endless glasses of hot tea."  He was not new to human disasters.  He had been a British civil servant in India, and had lived through an epidemic of cholera.  But, said he, "the novelty of this particular famine, what made it so diabolical, is that it was not the result of some catastrophe like a drought or an epidemic.  It was the deliberate creation of a bureaucratic mind": the breadbasket of Europe, turned into a wilderness.  He vowed to tell the truth.

Others had not.  Walter Duranty, writing for The New York Times, won a Pulitzer for his creampuff reportage of the Communist paradise.  Duranty was an amiable companion, said Muggeridge, but also "the greatest liar of any journalist I have ever met," and that took some doing.  Muggeridge was an agnostic, and by no means the most virtuous man in the room.  But he loved truth.  So he reported for the British Guardian:

The fields are neglected and full of weeds; no cattle are to be seen anywhere, and few horses; only the military and [Communist party officials] are well fed, and the rest of the population obviously starving, obviously terrorized.

Did Malcolm Muggeridge win a prize for his courageous reporting?  Hardly.  He lost his job — and, what's more, he knew he would.  If there were rainbow banners in those days, they were all for Stalin, the darling of the secular Left.  Several years later, when Stalin joined hands with Hitler, Muggeridge allowed himself to imagine "the Dean of Canterbury having a momentary doubt as to whether Stalin really would go on building the Kingdom of Christ."  The moment passed.  He knew that the Western intelligentsia would be like dope addicts returning to the next dose.

A Humble Woman in Calcutta

It is more than three decades later.  Our journalist has seen the "sheer imbecility of the kingdom of heaven on earth, as envisaged by the most authoritative and powerful voices of our time."  A mad spree of wealth and toys, people stupefied by television and sex, "happiness in as many colors as there are pills."  Nor was he overwhelmed by the totem of our day.  "Towards any kind of scientific mumbo-jumbo," he wrote, "we display a credulity which must be the envy of African witch-doctors."  But Muggeridge did not shroud his soul in satire.  The cynic hates falsehood, but he does not love the truth.  Muggeridge continued to seek, and that made him, again and again, turn to the words and the person of Jesus, more alive now than we who walk the earth.  And still Muggeridge did not believe in the Resurrection.

But this love for Jesus drew him to Calcutta, where a little wizened old Albanian nun was toiling in obscurity, loving the destitute and the dying, people afflicted with leprosy and gangrene, children reduced to sticks, human refuse.  Her name was Mother Teresa.

Yes, it was the same journalist who made Mother Teresa known to the world, first through a documentary and then through his book Something Beautiful for God.  "In a dark time," he wrote, "she is a burning and shining light; in a cruel time, a living embodiment of Christ's Gospel of love; in a Godless time, the Word dwelling among us, full of grace and truth."  Muggeridge donated all of the book's proceeds to Mother Teresa's work.  The two became very dear friends.

What an unlikely friendship that might seem, on the face of it! But consider.  Muggeridge had seen the parade of the "great" come and go.  The worst were devils in human form; even the best, a Churchill or an Eisenhower, were, in his eyes, at least half humbug.  He was a world traveler, while the nun's daily rounds were confined to that dreadful urban hole.  He could have rolled his eyes and smiled to himself at her simple faith.  He did not.  Here was truth, in action.

Muggeridge and Mother Teresa continued to correspond by letter.  She prayed for him ceaselessly, admonishing him, advising him to become like a little child, and to overcome the finite — the all-too-visible failings of the Church upon earth — with the infinite.  Finally, in 1982, at the age of seventy-nine, Malcolm Muggeridge was baptized a Roman Catholic, he and his wife Kitty.

"I Thirst"

Yet maybe they were united by something else, something that strikes the world with terror.

Malcolm Muggeridge tried to expose the liar Stalin to a world gone merry for its latest substitutes for Jesus and the Kingdom of God.  The world would not listen.  Then he brought to the world's never-very-keen attention the greatest Christian missionary of a century awash in blood and gin.  The world seemed to listen for a while.  But now that both he and she have passed on to the judgment of their Maker, the world has had second thoughts.

The world — that same world that found much wisdom in millions of copies of Mao's Little Red Book, the world that never met a tyrant it didn't like, the world fooled by ideas so brutally stupid and unreal that only intellectuals can believe them and dictators enforce them — that world, with its knowing smirk, now says that Mother Teresa perhaps was not a saint, and that Muggeridge sort of made her up.

Thousands of Missionaries of Charity are scattered across the world, doing work that no one else will do, and accompanying that work with gentle hands and loving smiles that no one else will give.  They are real, and the people they tend are real.  But Mother Teresa called abortion the greatest sin of our age, and Muggeridge was her apostle, Muggeridge who dared to tear the curtain from the Soviet vaudeville show, and who never ceased to laugh at the modern world and its bluster, its glamour and pomp and empty promises.  So they must be slandered.  The world knows better.

It seems to me a battle of drinkers, this.  We know from her diary that Mother Teresa was given a locution from Christ: his terrible words upon the cross.  "I thirst," said he.  He still does.  He is still where we have put him, on the black cross against a blank sky, thirsting, the longing that is more urgent than hunger, thirsting in love for souls in danger of loss.  He is the Savior who promises living waters to all who thirst, and who gives his blood as wine for his enemies, yearning to entice them with its taste, the taste of purity, holiness, and truth.  It is a heady liquor.  To Mother Teresa it was given to share in that thirst of Christ.

And somehow, somewhere in his long life, by the grace of God the agnostic journalist was given a taste of the wine.  The world slakes its thirst elsewhere.  It has made itself drunk on ditch water.  Let us not do so.  For Jesus, we know, is an excellent host.  He saves the best wine for last.